In the educational environment, teachers frequently organize a prepared lesson plan prior to the presentation of a lesson to the students. The lesson plan is essentially a prearranged strategy for imparting information to the students. In modernized classrooms, instructors often present the information with the assistance of audiovisual aids such as audiodiscs, videodiscs, videotapes, slides, overhead projectors, and the like. Ordinarily, personnel from a central audiovisual department transport the necessary hardware (monitors, speakers, etc.) and the prerecorded audio or visual materials to the classrooms as needed. Depending on the various formats that the information is recorded on, (i.e. videotape, videodisc, etc.) at least one machine capable of playing each desired format must also be brought to the room.
It can be readily appreciated that frequent transporting of such equipment is generally inconvenient; more significantly, such activity produces considerable wear and tear on the machines. Accordingly, centralized location of the machines is desirable and has become commonplace in many schools. By permanently wiring the various rooms with audio speakers and video monitors, and/or standard televisions, and connecting those units to a central location, the physical transportation of the media playing machines has become unnecessary. Indeed, by further including a control panel in each audiovisually-equipped classroom, the teacher can even control the playing of the machines. However, since most schools have a limited supply of playing machines and prerecorded media, some scheduling is necessary to ensure that two or more teachers are not planning to present material that cannot be executed, either because the desired media is not available or because all of the necessary type of playing machines for that media are already scheduled at the desired time.
As a result, computerized scheduling systems have been developed to organize the scheduling of machines and materials. However, with these systems only the scheduling is accomplished, and thus teachers must independently search for materials to be presented.
Moreover, these centrally located systems are designed to present only one tape or the like per class period. While theoretically multiple media might be presented, the flexibility of the material presented would be severely limited. For example, a teacher might schedule a tape for the first fifteen minutes, a five minute discussion, and a videodisc for the remainder of the class. With remote control capabilities, the teacher might then play the tape and present portions of the videodisc. During the five minute discussion, the audiovisual staff would have to disconnect the videotape player before connecting the videodisc player to the room. Furthermore, since the teacher is responsible for all playback operation, timing, and so on, unless an assistant is available the teacher becomes preoccupied with running the equipment instead of teaching the class. Realistically, scheduling the playback of more than three types of media in an hour-long class period would be impractical.
Additionally, no means are provided for automatically editing out undesirable portions of the materials while including only selected material. Thus, the teacher is forced to either present extraneous materials to students or manually control the playback apparatus, for example to advance a videodisc to predetermined frames.
Accordingly, teachers are severely limited in the diversity of materials presented, since each playback machine must be manually operated by the teacher. For example, the teacher has to manually fast forward or rewind tapes to certain visually recognized positions, manually move around a single videodisc to predefined starting and stopping points, and so on. Although U.S. Pat. No. 5,109,482 discloses a computer driven videodisc player that allows selected frames of a videodisc to be accessed and displayed in a predetermined order, no means are provided for interweaving multiple media displays into a single presentation. Thus, presenting only selected segments of multiple media still requires significant coordination and timing on the part of both the teacher and the audiovisual personnel. All of this reduces the amount of time that the teacher can spend answering questions, introducing upcoming materials, and otherwise teaching the class.
Finally, nothing is presently available to assist teachers in determining what media are appropriate for presentation. While the available media might be listed in a database containing tables of contents, brief written synapses and the like, and searched by subject, keywords, and the like, the teachers still have to separately obtain and preview the materials to determine their relevance.